…the musings of Melissa Billington, creatrix of MYOGA Freedom Online Yoga School & PocaHAUNTus–shapeshifting history into HerStory, & co-host of WhitePeople Whispering, as she connects with the land, water and fellow critters round this glorious globe!

this is how I pray

Last year at this time I was at Sundance. About 99% of people I have mentioned Sundance to assume I mean the film festival. I struggle to continue after that, except in the vein of pointing out how deeply the appropriation of “Indian” is in the western culture–so deep that it’s unconscious by now. Partly First Nation peoples had to hide their sacred ceremonies in order to keep them alive at all. But mostly the cultures of several continents of various peoples have been so successfully absorbed into the mainstream that the majority of people these days don’t have any clue how ignorant they are.

They’re so ignorant they don’t even know they’re ignorant.

So where to begin? Usually I begin & end in the same place, with simply clarifying that long before Sundance was a film festival, it was–and is–the ultimate First Nation ceremony. And I rarely go beyond leveling out that ignorance because beyond it I am also relatively ignorant. Even though I was there last year, supporting a dancer, & I have my own stories to tell of what I experienced & witnessed, even then I am woefully ignorant. And even if I were less ignorant, there is only so much I can tell anyway without betraying the sacredness of the ceremony by prattling on about it. Sundance is something that can only be experienced.

Just because I see something, hear something, or am taught something, does not mean I know it. I’ve come to fully respect repetition & reiteration as the main means of coming-to-know anything. I consider myself slow in this regard. While I am quick to comprehend with my mind, I feel laboriously slow in integrating that comprehension into the fibers of my being. I’ve come to trust this, and “trust the longer journey” is a reminder that I give to myself, & to students, as often as it’s relevant.

Trusting a longer journey requires taking a wider perspective. It means our vision extends beyond what seems to satiate us right now & takes into account the endless vistas of our ancestors &, all going well, our descendants. Perhaps this is part of the cause of our current crisis as a species–we’ve made our own place on this planet precarious because we’ve failed to look back far enough at where we’ve come from.

I don’t mean retelling history as we’ve been told it.

I mean knowing the patterns as we’ve become them.

Only when we can see a thing can we determine what to do with it. As long as you’re unconscious of the parasites in your system, you’ll only feel the effects of them & never be able to clear yourself of the source of your deterioration. You can not let go of what you don’t even know you’re holding onto in the first place (another phrase I say often to students in the process of cultivating awareness). Once you know you are harboring parasites, then you can either choose to continue feeding them or you can take every means possible to starve them off & purge them out. It’s the same with the patterns of behavior we so glibly title as what’s “always been that way”, whether it’s our own personalities, our families, or humanity as a whole.

People seem to take some sort of perverse delight in saying humanity has always been violent & reckless, or whatever else it is that they want to avoid changing. They shrug & say it’s all-ways been that way so it will never notbe that way & we might as well just resign ourselves to it.

And this is why I reckon it’s hard for me to get on the yoga mat, a battle my friend Kara-Leah calls mat resistance, & that I face every single time without fail. Even after 17 years of regularly showing up for myself on the mat, I still have to do battle to even get to the mat in the first place. Why?

Because I will have to face myself in all my glorious denial & defeatism. My body is honest. It is like the earth–a record of our time here–only a more particular record to me and what I’ve done with my own little piece of earth, this body.

I call it “The Naked Truth”, taken by Michael Hobbs (Boofa) at Powa Centre, about 2012

At this point in our evolution as a species I think we could safely add Denial to our list of skills. We may not have wings of our own, or even waterproof fur pelts, but we do have denial. It will keep us safe & warm as the raging storms of the repercussions of our past actions roll in.

Or will it?

As a young child with the pure heart that all young children have, I was devastated by the destruction all around me.

Children are closer to the ground. They see the minutia. They are also wired to receive everything around them & amplify it outwards, like speakers to the sound system.

In a crowded grocery store at the peak point of the day, when the adults are anxious & exhausted, the wailing vocal expression of what they are unsuccessfully trying to suppress in themselves will burst out through their as-yet-uncivilized children. Often the adults are embarrassed by this, but perhaps it’s because they themselves would wail at full volume too, if only they could.

With this little wise one & his peeps–these good folk hosted me & myoga in their lovely Lanzarote home. I love this earthwidetribe!

Children could be some of our greatest gurus if only we’d bend our knees & get closer to the ground, for it would require a humility akin to prayer to realize that they mirror us.

What I found down there close to the ground was a lot of dead animals & this was the main source of devastation for me. Where I grew up there were numerous hunting seasons. (Vegan Trigger Warning for this next paragraph.) While some of this meant food for folks, the majority of it was for fun, something I still cannot fathom. One of my babysitters had an abattoir out back–a cold cement house hung with glassy-eyed deer carcasses that fueled my nightmares & became part of my inability to ever consume red meat. The delusion of human sovereignty extended beyond hunting seasons into roadkill. Boys, mostly boys, would boast about purposefully running over animals in the road, instead of slowing to avoid them. My neighbor, whose lifestyle would best be described as being plucked straight from the Deliverance film (though we lived a few states north of West Virginia), bragged to me once about smashing the heads of the kittens their cat had newly delivered. And then dumping their lifeless bodies into their septic tank. This boys’ mother had no teeth, their house smelled of piss & they kept chickens and roosters in the many, many dead cars on their front lawn, which is what my bedroom window faced onto. For me, each carcass on the road, each kitten in the tank, each hunter driving by with a rifle rack, each visit to the plastic-wrapped grocery store with its gut-wrenching smell of dead meat laced with horrified blood, was a death that I mourned. It seemed to me, as a child, I was often crying. Crying for the plight of the animals.

Or the fruits & vegetables. One year (maybe I was 11?) I boycotted my favorite fruit–grapes–because they were being grown with pesticides that destroyed the workers & the very land that supported them.

So, maybe you can begin to see that for me (& I imagine for you too) it’s been very, very difficult to even know where to begin in this world. I’ve too often given up & resigned myself to being part of the problem, only to become debilitatingly sick–literally unable to run away & unable to breathe, forced to face what I did not want to see.

The levels of devastation on this earth are so accepted, so normalized, that we’d have to overthrow very nearly everything as we know it just to get down to some bedrock truth. How do we see what we don’t even realize we don’t see? By being willing to be destroyed, as we know ourselves to currently be, by all that we open our eyes to. And then by having the courage & the strength to begin again, daily.

6 thoughts on “this is how I pray”

Thank you Melissa, for sharing this. I pray by saying “om mane padme hum” each day (or most days) when I walk to the bus. When I do that, I lift my heart, breath in the beautiful bay air, and practice gratitude for a life where bombs do not fall from the sky onto people I love, where I have a home, and food.

Thank YOU Sharon! For sharing your words & also your prayers–I love that mantra. I’ve personally taken a bit of time to feel confident using the word prayer & in the process have also gained confidence in the practice of praying–there’s something very vulnerable or humbling about it. So now I find I still cry pretty regularly, but it’s from an effulgence, an overflow of gratitude & awe that these simple things you mention are real–our shelters, our tribes, our sustenance. May you & yours be well, much love, M

Melissa, thank you for bringing up the practice of prayer. I used to pray daily, thanking the greater powers for the attributes taught to me through mother and father energies and other portals to awareness. I used to formally ask forgiveness for my ignorance and pray for enlightenment and awareness that would serve others peacefully. But I have been remis and will gladly now, with your kind nudge resume this practice. Bad knees and all. Thank you.
I’ve been pondering lately about the global failure- to -thrive of Christianity. And wonder if prayer in that realm has been replaced with Retail Therapy. If people prefer The High of the Buy over the feeling of joy and connectedness and peacefulness and awareness that prayer can yield. It makes me wonder if its true that the greatest trick the devil ever played was convincing others that he didn’t exist. I wonder how true this is in my life and how true it is in the hearts of those who don’t know enough to embrace and thank the original powers of Sundance.

Becky, thank you for your thoughtful reply!
You touch on a good many points here. I’d love to hear how your renewed practice of prayer goes for you, however it looks–since it comes straight from your heart to the wider mystery of existence it doesn’t depend on doctrines or protocol. Though I do find a bit of ritual helpful. So maybe it doesn’t require kneeling, except in the energetic sense of getting closer to the ground that holds you up! But then again maybe by making a slow & kind practice of kneeling, little by little, & your knees would gain more mobility!

As for Retail Therapy, I can’t believe that people actually prefer “the high of the buy”, only that they don’t know any other sense of expansion. One of my students passed on a phrase to me that I really love: “Begin as you mean to continue.” As I wrote & performed PocaHAUNTus & had to take that really wide view to do it, I began to see clearly that the way the US was created, how it was begun, still continues today. And it’s also clearly unsustainable. Clearly. The white men came in like a pestilence bent on consumption, on feeding until sources ran dry. And they are. I wish I knew the antidote, the reversal to this suicidal consumerism that destroys the very limbs that hold it up. It may be that the whole thing needs to collapse into ruin & we begin again from the ground up, humbled by the devastation.